A lot! Joyce Vance gives us the low down: Friday night, Judge Chutkan rejected Trump’s “big” argument that he couldn’t be criminally prosecuted for acts committed during his presidency because he had blanket immunity. We discussed the motion when he filed it in early October (read here if you want a refresher on its substance). At the time, I characterized the argument as a flawed one, likely to be a swing and a miss. Judge Chutkan agreed. “The Constitution’s text, structure, and history do not support that contention [that the charges should be dismissed],” she wrote in her opinion. “No court—or any other branch of government—has ever accepted it. And this court will not so hold. Whatever immunities a sitting President may enjoy, the United States has only one Chief Executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass.’” Read her entire opinion here.
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Are you curating your feed or is something else? A medical professional at a friend’s party recently asked if I’d had any contact with a mutual acquaintance. No, not since before the pandemic. But I’d been horrified a year or so earlier when I glanced at her Facebook page and found a stream of anti-vax and “do your research” style postings. He knew. It’s why he asked. He’d run into her at the gym. She told him she’d not received the Covid shots and had lost friends over it. And she’d been a medical professional as well. What happened? Perhaps the isolation during the pandemic. Perhaps too much time exposed to an algorithmically generated diet of such stuff. David French this morning cautions about the dangers of creating our own curated bubble realities. Conspiracy theories have been with us forever. Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel” recounts tales of Depression-era Americans convinced that Jews and communists had taken over the government. They stockpiled canned good and weapons for when the Jews came marching down the street to make slaves of them.
ICYMI. (You did not, of course.) Medhi Hasan’s take-downs are what people watch MSNBC for. Chris Hayes (MSNBC primetime host): The nature of this business is that people who are supremely talented sometimes have shows cancelled. It’s rough every time, but it comes with the territory (lord knows I’ve been close myself!) But I just want to say that @mehdirhasan is one of the most talented broadcast journalists I’ve ever seen or worked with and probably the single best interviewer in American TV. Grateful to have him as a colleague. Taylor Lorenz (Washington Post technology and online culture columnist): Mehdi is literally one of the only people in cable TV with a moral compass still intact. What a huge loss Washington Post: Although Hasan was not among MSNBC’s top-rated stars, his segments often went viral on social media, where users celebrated his takedowns of conservatives such as former Trump adviser John Bolton and Israeli government adviser Mark Regev. During a Nov. 16 interview on his show for NBC’s Peacock streaming service, Hasan pressed Regev on the children killed in Gaza by Israeli strikes.
One had fun, the other one not so much. Guess which was which. Even big GOP influencer “Catturd” notices. (I’m no joking , he’s the leader of MAGA twitter.) When Florida Gov. Ron Desantis agreed to debate California Gov. Gavin Newsom it’s unlikely he knew his presidential campaign would be flailing to the extent it is. But he still should have thought twice. Whatever his political skills might be, he is terrible on the debate stage. He managed to barely hold his own in the sad Trumpless GOP primary debates that have been dominated by his rival former S. Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. He did himself no favors on Thursday night when he finally met with Newsom on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. Any Trump fan, which would include virtually all Fox viewers, were primed to watch him be humiliated. Trump spokesman Steve Cheung either taking dictation from the boss or channeling him perfectly, put out this humdinger of a statement in advance of the event: “Ron DeSanctimonious is acting more like a thirsty, third-rate OnlyFans wannabe model than an actual presidential candidate.
Hookay, Christian Ziegler, the Chairman of the Florida GOP, has been accused of committing sexual violence against a woman who was in a longstanding, consensual sexual relationship with him AND his wife. And the wife, Bridget Ziegler, is the co-founder of Moms For Liberty, an organization that treats LGBTQ people, especially Trans people, like they are sexual predators. They were in a bisexual threesome relationship and the husband is accused of sexually predator behavior. Oh, and they’re big Christians. MAGA… sigh.
The media refuses do it Kevin Drum: On a monthly basis, core PCE inflation was down to 2.0%, which is the Fed’s target rate. Headline inflation was even better, clocking in close to zero. On a year-over-year basis, headline inflation came in at 3.0% and core inflation at 3.5%. POSTSCRIPT: Now that inflation is going down instead of up, I notice that neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post even bothers to report it on their front page. Even the Wall Street Journal mentions it only under a headline about consumer spending slowing down. And we wonder why people don’t seem to know that inflation is way down? I’m very sick of hearing excuses that the reason people say the economy is bad is because they just don’t “feel” it. They do. They’re spending like crazy. The problem is that when people are polled they reflect the conventional wisdom which they get from the media. The right wing media will never tell the truth about this. But there is no excuse for the way the MSM is covering this story.
When leaders ignore threats, they should pay a price That August 6th memo to George W. Bush with a big warning that “Al Qaeda determined to strike inside the United States” which he and others in his administration ignored, may be the moment that permanently destroyed Bush’s reputation, (There were a lot of them, of course. Mission Accomplished” was also one of the worst.) It looks like Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was similarly warned and did nothing about it, which they wouldn’t, since they believed Hamas was contained and that the real issue was giving the extremist Israeli wingnuts on the West Bank everything they wanted. Oy vey. The NY Times reported today: Israeli officials obtained Hamas’s battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.
Polar bear babies! Mierlo, November 30, 2023 – A healthy polar bear has been born in Dierenrijk. The delivery took place peacefully in the Frimas polar bear maternity. Mother and the newborn are doing well. Head animal caretaker Stephan Rijnen: “In early November, we noticed that the mother was retreating to the maternity room. From this, we could deduce that the mating we observed in March was likely successful! A polar bear gestation lasts about eight months, so we had to wait a bit. Tuesday morning, we reviewed the camera footage and discovered good news! A young polar bear the size of a guinea pig was lying with mother Frimas.” The maternity room is a separate enclosure connected to the indoor enclosure of the polar bears in Dierenrijk. This space is built so that pregnant polar bears can withdraw for childbirth. When designing the maternity room, the natural behavior of female polar bears in the wild was also taken into account. Rijnen: “In the wild, the expectant mother goes into winter hibernation, in the snow den she has dug herself. First, the mother eats to fullness so that she is strong enough to survive the winter.
It’s a major pillar of Trump’s vengeance agenda Of course Republicans hate Obamacare and will repeal it it the first chance they get. Why would anyone think otherwise? Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Republican presidential primary front-runner Donald Trump revived calls to roll back Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, if he returns to the White House. “The cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it’s not good Healthcare. I’m seriously looking at alternatives,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social on Saturday. Trump’s post resurrects an issue on which he and his party are vulnerable. A Sept. 15-19 NBC News poll found that when it comes to health care, voters trust Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 45%-22%. The same survey found that Democrats trail the GOP on many other issues, including the economy, immigration and crime. After trying and failing to repeal the ACA, and suffering for it at the ballot box, Republican candidates abandoned their calls for eliminating the law in the 2022 midterm elections, recognizing the push as a political loser.
Another Trump innovation Trump’s abuse of the pardon power is well known. But this analysis by Protect Democracy pinpoints three specific abuses that are unprecedented and provide a major threat in a Trump second term: During the Trump presidency, we saw three types of henchmen pardons: Self-protective pardons: Trump dangled pardons for associates implicated in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia, notably former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, providing an incentive for them not to cooperate with the Mueller investigation into Trump and his 2016 campaign. Both were indicted, in Manafort’s case sentenced to years in jail, and later pardoned. Pardons to reward illegal political activity that accrued to his benefit: Trump pardoned 2000 Mules filmmaker and vocal ally Dinesh D’Souza, who pled guilty to using straw donors to make illegal campaign donations to a Republican Senate candidate.